Persecute or communicate

Yesterday I twittered “Industrial Age, Atomic Age, Jet Age, Space Age, Information Age… What’s next?” Andre Martin replied “social age?” If the world around us is moving to the social age, far too many corporations are stuck in the industrial age, the stone age even.

With growing economic uncertainty, inter-office rumors, gossiping and eavesdropping in the workplace are inevitable. More than 20 per cent of respondents to an HR survey said their employees had been disciplined for such behaviour. And so the solution is to invest in technology to prevent it. But you are never going to be able to stop it, indeed taking such measures is more likely to give oxygen to fear, mistrust and dissent. The investment would be better spent opening up channels of communication, getting the gossip out in the open and developing a culture of trust and understanding. How? Introducing a corporate FaceBook to replace the moribund intranet would be a start.

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[…] it. Whether or not that is true and as the increasing consensus seems to be that we are entering “the social era” the way each of us and indeed each organisation has reponded to this meterological event is a […]

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Marc McNeill

For more than a decade Marc has been a passionate advocate of placing the customer at the heart of business, working with clients in finance, retail, government and entertainment sectors, helping them craft compelling cross channel customer experiences. Marc champions lean and agile approaches for making customer driven innovation happen. He co-authored the book Agile Experience Design. As a consultant with ThoughtWorks he brought design thinking and creativity to clients, engaging across their organisations with a focus on delivery as well as ideas. Today he is Customer Experience Director at Auto Trader. He has been known to dance and is rather partial to mangos.